


i'll be the sea; you be the tide

by mayor_crumblepot



Category: Gotham (TV)
Genre: (isnt that just a theme in all of my works at this point? oops...), Excessive Drinking, Future Fic, M/M, Mental Instability, Near Future, enemies to begrudging friends to lovers, friends forever despite the weather, im so happy i get to use that tag, weaponized amy winehouse lyrics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-11
Updated: 2018-02-11
Packaged: 2019-03-16 15:49:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,661
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13639377
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mayor_crumblepot/pseuds/mayor_crumblepot
Summary: a little "what if," in which Oswald unknowingly dresses up like the hallucination Ed had of him at the mansion. Ed sees him like this in public, and the response isn't particularly positive.





	i'll be the sea; you be the tide

**Author's Note:**

> _ we can live for nothing _   
>  _ baby, i don't care _   
>  _ lose me like the ocean _   
>  _ feel the motion _   
>  [ the tide — pale waves ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MwBBIcVKFNs)

Things are never exactly the same after Ed regains his footing and Oswald returns to the top of Gotham's underworld, neither of them expect things to be quite the same as they used to be. Still, things are going moderately well, all things considered.

They have an agreement of sorts; an indefinite ceasefire after a length of time spent trying to avoid fighting one another by any means necessary. 

Between them, full blown arguments have devolved into petty spats; riddles that border on romantic, written in green spray paint on brick walls on Ed's end and obviously empty promises of violence on Oswald's. (Oswald may also be paying off large number of people to keep Ed safe— nobody has to know about that, though.)

Rarely ever do their lives converge, not face to face. This is by design. Ed is well aware that if he were to face Oswald, to truly look at him and see how the last year alone has aged him, has hardened him and made him much colder; he doubts he'd endure it well. One of the many things Ed liked about Oswald was his vibrant passion, and it's terrifying to see that drain from him. 

Ed can't stand to look at Oswald for long periods of time, to see the dead look in his eyes or the increasing slope of his spine— he knows that Oswald is working himself to death. Sometimes, Ed wonders if it's purposeful. He never sees Oswald out and about, posturing and ruffling his feathers, so to speak. The rare times that he does, it shows just how hard Oswald is pushing himself.

Wednesday night brings Oswald to the newly rebuilt Sirens, all trussed up for the grand re-opening. Barbara, Tabitha, and Selina all strike radiant, intimidating figures in the hazily lit room. All grudges are suspended for the night and the day that follows for the sake of a good time. 

The invitation that Oswald received said "extremely formal," so he goes all out. He gets a new tuxedo fitted, a simple black and white number with a royal purple pocket square that matches the styling wax he's put in his hair. In comparison to Oswald's recent fashion choices— moderately unkempt, disheveled, and covered in blood as a form of intimidation —he looks extremely nice.

A few miscalculations were made, in regards to the night. 

Oswald miscalculates for the sheer number of people that are going to be attending the re-opening of the Sirens. He miscalculates for the strength of the mixed drinks being served at the open bar, and he also miscalculates the probability of Edward Nygma's attendance.

In a booth at the back of the club, Oswald finds himself just a little drunk, watching Ed nervously maneuver around people. He confidently orders a grasshopper at the bar, the color of the drink barely matching his suit— how gaudy. Throughout the night, as the socialites and politicians filter out to leave the criminals in familiar company, Oswald watches Ed go back to the bar repeatedly, each time coming away with the same ugly, sickly-sweet cocktail. 

"Ozzie," Barbara says, beautiful in a gold dress, backlit by the blue light of the room, "you've been sitting all night. Can't a girl get a dance?" 

Before he answers, Oswald considers the mostly empty dance floor, "Well, how could I say no when you asked so nicely?" Getting up out of the booth gives Oswald trouble, hand trembling on his cane before he finds a comfortable balance.

"You know how to waltz?"

"I can't say I do," he admits, although he's certain he remembers his mother laying a napkin out on the floor and teaching him his way around it. "I'm not very graceful, I'm afraid."

"That's okay," Barbara's voice lilts and bounces with a giggle, "I'm just a little tipsy. I'll try to teach you." With her high heels, Barbara is a bit taller than the ideal partner for Oswald to dance with, but the two of them are perfectly matched in their marginal inelegance. 

Times like these are ones that make Oswald wonder what his life would have been like had he followed the holy path that his mother would have liked; if he had followed the moral high ground that men like Jim Gordon struggle to tread. He wasn't always corrupt— Oswald wasn't born a killer, but rather a child with a nervous disposition, frail bones, and an adoration for the birds that sung outside of his bedroom window. It isn't clear to him when he decided which path he would follow; he can't remember which day he stopped attending church with his mother and stayed home to practice butterfly knife trips, when he started learning to stitch his own wounds. Sometimes, he thinks it's for the best that he can't tell when he changed, because it keeps him from being able to see where the "old Oswald" died and the "new" one was born. (That line of thought is more Ed's territory, he thinks.)

Still, he wonders. Where did the boy with skinned knees and the lopsided smile go? When did he decide he was too cool to go shopping with his mother? When did he drop out of school, when did he stop letting his mother use him as a fashion form, when did he realize that his skin was more scar tissue than it was freckles? Why did it have to happen so fast, and why does his stomach have to clench right there in the center where—

"What's up with Nygma?"

Oswald doesn't know how long he's been dancing with Barbara; when he thinks about it, when he considers the ache in his knee, it very well could have been a while. In the background, the lights have shifted red and vicious, casting a glow outside into the sleeping streets of Gotham— Amy Winehouse croons miserably over tower speakers. 

 _"He's fierce in my dreams, seizing my guts, he floats me with dread."_ Overhead, the voice continues and echoes, suddenly very loud in the empty room. The words make Oswald feel laid bare, make him feel entirely predictable and fragile. He turns around to the source of a crashing sound, where Barbara is pointing.

There's shattered glass in a green puddle on the ground, bringing with it the overwhelming smell of mint. Next to it all, Ed is the most terrified that Oswald has ever seen him; glasses sliding down his face and teeth bared, face slick with sweat, hair in his eyes. 

Oswald knows that face; he knows it intimately, and he wishes he didn't. He wishes he didn't know what that face looked like backlit by the fireplace, in the dark of a bedroom, in the middle of a crowd, against the holy arch of the windows in the office. 

What hurts the most is that Ed is looking right at him, right through Oswald, like he's seen the devil himself. With hands in his hair, clutching violently at the sides of his head, Ed looks like he's speaking, repeating words over and over; he loses his glasses to the puddle on the floor. It seems like he doesn't even notice the loss, rocking with the words coming out of his mouth, eyes unfocused but still trained on Oswald like a sniper in the dark, from a library window to an open top car. 

"Edward," Oswald pushes glass aside with the tip of his cane, hesitant to come to his knees in front of Ed. That seems too dangerous, even now; too trusting, too soul baring. "Can you hear me?"

_"Soaked in soul, he swims in my eyes by the bed. Pour myself over him, moon spilling in—"_

"And I wake up alone," Ed's voice is so small, so weak and fractured, repeating over and over so quickly that it has started to go hoarse. "And I wake up alone. And I wake up alone. And I wake up alone.  _And I wake up_ alone."

"Ed," it takes some effort, but Oswald schools his features into an expression of concern that doesn't give him away entirely, "please. It's just me, it's Oswald. Can you hear me?" He plants a hand on Ed's shoulder, leaning forward with the help of his cane for balance. The tasseled ends of his tuxedo scarf come dangerously close to the drink on the floor, ghosting over the surface of the puddle. "I think you might be drunk, Edward, I can call you a taxi, and—"

"Are you real?"

"Am I— What? Ed, don't be silly."

"I've seen you like this before," Ed tells him, vision clouded with what might be drunkenness or fear or desire— Oswald pushes the thought out, "once before. You looked exactly like this, with the lights and the music and the scarf— you don't have the hat."

"The hat?" A chill runs through Oswald's spine as he thinks of the top hat sitting on his dining room table, left behind because it felt just a bit too dramatic. "Ed, you're scaring me— what's this about?"

"You didn't answer me. Are you real?" There's something so terrifyingly trusting in Ed's face when he blinks up into Oswald's eyes, looking for something that might make him feel secure again. The love in Oswald's heart flares, the need to protect Ed overwhelms him, no matter the costs.

"I'm real," he squeezes Ed's shoulder, draws his hand down Ed's arm as he comes to crouch in front of the other man and sweep away the broken glass. "Would you let me take you home? I'll have someone drive you wherever you want from there." It looks like Ed is trying to form words, but the bass line coming through the speakers leaves him silent. His eyes flit from Oswald's suit, from the rhinestones on his tuxedo scarf, from the spilled grasshopper beneath his shoes, to his eyes. "Please, Ed. I'm concerned about your behavior."

Once Ed has been loaded into the car, Oswald thanks the alcohol in his system for granting him the strength to come to Ed's aid. Barbara hugs Oswald warmly, "Thanks for coming out— we miss you over here," she kisses his cheek, leaving a smear of hot pink. "Thanks for grabbing Eddie, too. Had any of us tried to pull him up like that he'd probably have killed us."

"A little something for the road?" Tabitha offers up a shot of vodka, carefully brought out from the bar within. It almost seems like a challenge, a joke presented just within the means of being polite. 

Oswald tucks Ed's glasses into his breast pocket and looks at the offending glasses for a moment. He thinks about the way Ed looks at him without his glasses, the way Ed's whole body gravitates toward heat when he's afraid, the way the grungy fog on Gotham's streets at night makes Ed seem like a biblical vision. Without hesitation, Oswald reaches forward and takes the shot, knocking it back with ease. 

"You should have brought two," he says, coughing on the burn as he slides into the back seat of the limousine, "I'm already wishing I'd had more."

As they ride through empty streets, rain starts coming down, making loud tapping sounds against the top of the cabin, accompanied by the furious sound of windshield wipers on glass. "Have you ever used drugs?" Ed speaks up, voice barely a whisper among the sounds around them.

"I'm sorry?" Oswald is cut short by the thunder that scares both he and Ed into a moment of stiff silence, "I— I haven't. No."

"I did. After I killed you." Now, so many months later, it only stings a little to remember that night. Likely, the two of them remember it differently; the smells, the lights, the sounds. They both remember the pain similarly, though— they remember each others' faces, slowly disappearing into darkness. The finality of it all. 

"Is that what you meant earlier?" Nervously, Oswald turns to face Ed, to look at him and watch the way lightning makes his muscles tense, "About the lights and the hat?" Ed doesn't speak, simply nods and rubs his hands over the tops of his thighs, over and over and over. "Did you do it a lot? The drugs?"

"Roughly ten times," he chokes out, slowly reaching up to grab his hair again. Halfway through, Oswald reaches out and grabs his wrists, stopping him.

"I don't know how to help you, Ed." Oswald refuses to let go of Ed's wrists, forcing them to meet halfway in the center seat. "I want to, but I don't know what you need. You've always confused me," there's a pitiful laugh in the back of Oswald's throat, so terribly in love and slowly being swallowed whole by it all. 

"I don't mean to," Ed's fingers twitch with the need to finish the aborted motion, to scratch his scalp until it bleeds, "everything makes so much sense in my head. Always ten steps ahead. Never in the moment."

"That's alright," he lies, knowing well and good that Ed will never be  _all there_ again, not like he used to be. "May— May I be frank with you?"

There's a sound that leaves Ed, something like the way a wild animal sounds as it goes underneath your tires at sixty miles an hour. "Haven't you always been?"

"No, not particularly." Thinking back, Oswald finds himself in the dining room, table set out with food that now, he's glad Ed never saw. In retrospect, it all was too much. There was no reason to try and convince Ed with dramatics, with candlelight, expensive wine, and one of his nicest vintage jazz records, "I'd like you to stay with me at the manor tonight." If Ed had ever loved him, he would have stayed for whatever Oswald gave him. Oswald could have laid the table out in glass shards and dismembered limbs, in wine glasses half empty or perhaps half full, depending on the angle he found himself at; had Ed loved him, he would have been there, right at his side. Ed would have stayed home that night, would have slept with him on the couch in front of the fireplace as rain and wind threatening to break the windows— those dramatic stained glass windows that haunt Oswald every day as he works, the only eyes to have seen the truth of how desperately Oswald loved Ed and continues to love him, more and more with every passing day. 

"Okay," he nods, starting to sink toward Oswald, forehead finding the other man's shoulder. "Am I miserable enough to have earned a pity request?"

"You know I'd do anything for you if you asked me nicely enough," Oswald says, immediately horrified by his own sincerity. He can blame that on Tabitha— if it all goes to hell, it's her fault for taunting a tired man with his poison of choice.

"Can we put the fireplace on? I miss it." Ed smells so strongly of mint that Oswald wonders if he'd spilled the grasshopper on his clothes, but it all seems to be coming from his breath. It ghosts over Oswald's cheek, deceptively warm.

"Of course we can, Ed."

They still fit on the couch together perfectly, once Oswald clears away the evidence that he's been sleeping there for some nights on end. He helps Ed out of his jacket, throwing the rained-on garment at the door with general apathy. The hardwoods have been bloodstained, stabbed, and scrabbled over— a water stain isn't going to change anything. 

Sitting opposite of one another, watching the fire grow, the two share silence until thunder sends them both into frantic motion. Ed wraps a blanket around his shoulders and Oswald rises to his feet, quick to find the stocked bar cart by the doorway. They haven't sat together, here, like this since— "I need a drink," Oswald announces, as he always has, having to force away the shaking in his hands as he clutches a bottle in his hand, "can I get you some water?"

"You've had more to drink tonight than I have," Ed observes, cocking his head to invite Oswald back to the couch, "I'll just have some of yours."

Oswald brings his undiluted scotch over to the couch, the liquid still somewhat warm despite the ice in the glass. He sits an arm's length away from Ed, stirring the ice around with his finger inelegantly. Ed takes the glass from him and swallows a heavy amount before recoiling, holding the glass as far away from him as possible. When the sour expression subsides, Ed goes back in for the rest of it, forcing it down with a conviction that worries Oswald more than a little. 

Is that what he looks like at the end of the day? Pushing drinks down his throat just to make it into the night? How pathetic. 

"What was that for?" Oswald asks, frowning at his empty glass.

"Courage."

"Courage for  _what?_ "

"I'd get another drink, if I were you."

For once in his life, Oswald listens without question, coming back with another scotch, this time with a splash of water at the bottom. He's quick to start putting it away, watching as Ed fidgets with the edge of the blanket. "I can bring you a pillow, if you—"

"Just stay right here," Ed tells him, reaching up to scrub his hands over his face. He freezes, pulling his hands away and looking around frantically. "Where are my glasses?"

Oswald produces them from his pocket, nearly dropping his drink in the process. "They might be a bit sticky," he says, making no effort to clean them off, "you dropped them in your drink."

"I love you."

"What—"

"I hate it. I  _drink_ now," the words rip from Ed's lips, full of despair, "I drink to forget, to get away from you in my own head— you never  _leave_."

"Should I be apologizing?" Oswald wants to put his hands up in surrender, but instead just takes another sip off of his drink. "I don't know what I did wrong, but—"

"You loved me once and now it's all I can think about; every riddle, every taunt," he reaches up for his hair, and this time Oswald isn't quick enough to stop him, "it's all choreographed for  _you_! I know you're paying off the Indica Syndicate  _and_ Tetch." One hand slams back down onto the couch and it takes all of Oswald's composure not to drop his glass, not to let it suddenly slip from his hand. "I don't understand, I don't  _understand_. What do you gain from this, from all of this? From taking care of me?"

"Ed, I—" something inside of Oswald aches because he never thought he'd have to do this again. He never thought he'd have to bare his heart in front of Ed again, with tears in his eyes and a shirt collar that feels too tight. "I love you, even now. That's never changed. I can't stop myself from loving you— I thought you knew that." 

"Why?"

"Why what?"

"Why didn't it change?" Ed is crying, so visibly overwhelmed by his emotions and the alcohol running through his blood. "Why can't you just decide you hate me?" 

"I got my revenge," reaching out, Oswald takes Ed's hand and squeezes, "and you got yours. That's it. I realized that we had settled our score. How long have you been dealing with this?"

Suddenly, Ed is wrapping himself tighter in the blanket and trying to wrench away from Oswald. He's holding himself and clawing into his skin, struggling for words. "Months. A year. I just wanted to see you. I missed you, as soon as you hit the water."

"Well," Oswald wants to come off as smooth, but he chokes on the wetness in his throat, "I'm here, aren't I?"

"I love you, and it's awful," he says sourly, trying to mask the sound of his own crying. "You were the only one, and now—"

"Now what?"

"We're not who we were before," Ed barks, gesturing wildly with his hands, "I'm  _stupid_ and you're  _cold._ "

"You aren't stupid," the words fall off of Oswald's tongue quicker than he can think them, hands rising up to Ed's shoulders, "but you can be a bit dense, sometimes." He looks over Ed's face for some kind of answer, some kind of  _anything_ that can guide him. "I'd like to kiss you."

"Don't be cruel."

"I'm sure you know, as well as I do, that we're above that, now."

Without warning, Ed ducks his head in and kisses Oswald, holds him by the cheeks and kisses him firmly. It lasts for longer than Oswald thought any kiss with Ed would, but it's just as beautiful as he'd imagined. It's even harder to stop kissing Ed, to part for air and separate long enough to finish his drink. 

They fall asleep on the couch in front of a dwindling fire, Oswald draped over Ed's chest, Ed's hands on the back of his waist. In the morning, Ed is still there. He helps Oswald up the stairs, patiently waits outside of the bathroom for his turn to take a shower, and he helps Oswald get dressed like they used to.

"I love you," Oswald tells him over coffee, looking at him earnestly with wet hair hanging in his eyes, "you believe me now, don't you?"

"Of course," Ed nods, yawning before reaching out to take Oswald's hand. He feels younger, so much lighter; like this was how things were supposed to go the first time around. Had they both just been honest, forthcoming, sincere— "You know," he starts, focusing on a distant point outside of the dining room, "you weren't the only person I hallucinated. You were the only one to sing, though."

" _Oh,_ " Oswald grins, lacing their fingers together and leaning in like the gossip he is, "you  _have_ to tell me about that, Eddie."

**Author's Note:**

> thanks for reading. i think this counts as a happily ever after. i don't know. i just want them to talk again. 
> 
> i really love the fact that gotham made ed canonically drink grasshoppers? and that he _knows_ what they are. the idea that ed has a moderately good knowledge of martinis? cute. 
> 
> especially because it begs the comparison i tried to make, which is queer-coded oswald with his harsh masculine drinks and het-coded ed with his drink that's the equivalent of a mint chocolate chip milkshake. 
> 
> anyway.
> 
> talk to me on tumblr! i'm [ mayor-crumblepot ](https://mayor-crumblepot.tumblr.com)


End file.
